Large manufacturers today face extreme margin pressures from low-cost producers, rising energy costs, and regulatory and environmental restrictions. At the same time, environmental, health & safety compliance cannot be compromised. The need to improve asset performance has never been greater.
However, one of the greatest challenges for effectively improving plant asset performance is that the necessary information is scattered across disconnected silos of data in each department. Furthermore, it is difficult to integrate these silos due to several fundamental differences. For example, control system data is real-time data measured in terms of seconds, whereas maintenance cycle data is generally measured in terms of calendar based maintenance (e.g., days, weeks, months, quarters, semi-annual, annual), and financial cycle data is measured in terms of fiscal periods. Industrial equipment vendors and enterprise software vendors tend to have proprietary coding schemes (e.g., work order status codes) and are non compliant with any universal standard.